Tuesday, September 29, 2009

It has a pleasing Spanish colonial flavor, and the view from the arcade is superb in the morning as you sip your coffee.

Actually (chuckle), I'm pulling your leg.

This is the guest house. The bunks are in adjacent buildings.

The orginal adobe ranch house was built sometime before 1888, burned out in in 1941, and was rebuilt and enlarged a year later.

The pool was added in 1947, and serves its purpose quite well after a day on the range.

The Nature Conservancy and California's Department of Fish & Game showed great insight when they partnered to secure the two ranch parcels between 2000 and 2004.

Their actions insured that the land would remain in the public trust as a corridor linking the rugged Los Padres National Forest to the west (the outer coast range) with the Carrizo Plain National Monument to the east.

Chimineas Ranch, named for the old chimneys of the original adobe buildings is now owned and managed by Cal Fish & Game for wildlife conservation and research, hunting, and a sustainable approach to cattle grazing.

Dipodomys ingens -- whether you accent the first or second syllable you gotta love the poetic name.

They are the largest of k-rats, and make a hearty meal for medium-sized owls like the long ear.

Their furry toes float on sand, and their hindlegs can catapult them as far as 6-feet.

If you ever chase a k-rat as it richochets in moonlight or the headlights of your car, you'll marvel at their nimble footwork and changes in direction.

Giant k-rats were the main food item in the long-eared owl pellets we examined a few hours earlier in the day.

And speaking of food . . . in my gangly youth the late Robert T. Orr, Curator of Birds and Mammals at the California Academy of Sciences related how he and mammalogist E. Raymond Hall once made a fine collection of k-rats in the Nevada desert.

"One afternoon we set 100 snap traps and the next morning 98 of them had rodents."

They decided to cook up those meaty veal-colored k-rats haunches.

Instead of hardwood sawdust they used cornmeal to skin the rats (either product eases the skinning and removes fat), and they saved the plump hindquarters in a coffee can which they stashed under the front seat of the car.

They forgot about it, but only temporarily.

As they were cruising the dirt roads a couple days later there was a dull thud under the car seat and they were overtaken by a powerful stench.

No one dined on k-rat haunches that trip.

Here the giant k-rat shares it habitat with kit foxes, which together with burrowing owls usually eat the rats fresh.

Thursday, September 17, 2009

The next day, August 19, we plied the back country roads by pickup to find areas for new sets.

The arroyo (set 294) was bordered by a dense thicket on one side and a cliff on the other.

A deep channel upstream dumps seasonal precipitation into the creek from time to time, but it may also serve as a travel route for wildlife.

This is a project of California Department of Fish & Game, and the department was the beneficiary of a large supply of canned mackerel that was contaminated with sand and deemed unsuitable for human consumption.

The Department is making good use of the mackerel as bait to trap problem bears for relocation and also gave us a supply for our camera trapping survey at Chimineas.

We punctured a can for this set and wired it to a limb over the arroyo, and we also used apple and almond scent lures.

The set below is another shallow sandstone cave.

Fred took shelter there; the heat was really getting to the poor guy.

When we got back to the car I had to restrain him from running up the hill to the cave again.

This cave was on a bluff near the top of a steep sandhill, and off the main chamber were a couple of narrow offshoots.

Okay, it doesn't look promising compared to the other cave and rock recess, but maybe something visits the place now and then for the view if offers of the countryside.

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

I've been revisiting the cow carcass in Photoshop -- cropping coyote images to figure out how many animals were in that family.

This coyote -- look carefully at the left side of the picture -- was bold enough to walk up to the camera and check it out.

The camera took two photos of it 3 seconds apart.

Here it is a minute later having a snack of marinated beef jerky.

Its body proportions tell me it's an adult, and if you look at that hind foot at the top of the page you'll see that it has a few battle scars.

This is the first time I've had a coyote check a camera up close.

It happens all the time with bears, which are naturally curious, but the legendary coyote usually doesn't take chances like this.

But all coyotes aren't alike.

Eveline Sequin Larrucea and her co-workers studied the reaction of marked and radio-collared coyotes to camera traps, and found interesting differences between breeding territorial coyotes (alphas), nonbreeding resident adults (betas), and dispersing transients.

Her photos revealed leery coyotes making haste, but the fast Trailmaster film cameras and active infra-red sensors captured full body images good enough for individual identification.

First finding of note: coyotes didn't rush in as soon as the cameras were set.

On average the first coyote photo was taken 14 days into the 6-week trapping sessions.

Camera trap success (total # of coyotes divided by # of active camera traps) was highest for adult coyotes during March and April, and for juveniles during July and August.

Photo-captures of adults peaked at midnight, while juveniles showed more or less equal peaks at dusk, dawn, and midnight.

Photos of adults peaked 2-weeks after the cameras were deployed, while photos of juveniles peaked during weeks three and four.

Social status also had its effect.

Only three territory-holding coyotes, the resident breeders, were photographed and all between midnight and 2:30AM.

Resident nonbreeding adults (the betas) were photographed throughout the night, while the transients were photographed most often at dawn and dusk.

There were other differences too, but what it all boils down to is this: population estimates based on photo-capture and recapture of identifiable animals can vary two-fold depending on the time of year.